Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday fired Vladislav Surkov, one of his most famous advisers, the creator of "Putinism" and the "vertical of power" whose departure had been rumored for weeks.
The dismissal of Surkov (55) was announced by presidential decree on the Kremlin's website, and his possible future functions were not announced.
Already on February 11, Surkov was succeeded as the chief negotiator on the conflict in the east of Ukraine by the deputy head of the presidential administration, Dmitry Kozak (61), which occurred at the time of the renewal of the peace process between Moscow and Kyiv.
The Russian opposition cannot stand Surkov, because he organized the establishment of a system of government from the presidential administration in early 2000 with the help of controlled media, meek opposition in the parliament and suppression of protests, writes Hina.
It is Surkov who created the concept of "vertical power", state power that depends only on Vladimir Putin.
Since 2014, he has been the main Russian strategist in the Ukrainian crisis, marked by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the conflict between the forces of Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country in which more than 13.000 people died.
He was obsessed with preventing pro-Western popular uprisings that broke out in several former Soviet republics, such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003.
While Moscow does not admit that it financially and militarily supports the separatists, Surkov does not hide his personal ties with them. At the funeral of Alexander Zakrachenko, one of the leaders of the rebels in the east of Ukraine, who was killed in 2018, he publicly called him "brother".
Surkov called the Western sanctions imposed on Russia precisely because of its role in the conflict in eastern Ukraine a "political Oscar" and a "great honor."
Despite this, Surkov is an avid lover of American culture, a fan of the rapper Tupac Shakur, whose photo with Che Guevara was on the wall of his office in the Kremlin.
He was born in 1964, to a Chechen father and a Russian mother, and began his career in 1987 at the Menatep bank, where he was hired by Mihajlo Khodorovsky, a man who grew into an oligarch and billionaire and became Vladimir Putin's greatest enemy.
Surkov was noticed and hired by the Kremlin shortly before the sudden withdrawal of Boris Yeltsin from the presidency at the end of 1999 with Putin's rise to power.
Surkov is also the author of a novel with a political plot that he writes under the pseudonym (Natan Doubovicki), and he also writes lyrics for the songs of the Russian rock band Agatha Christie.
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